You are probably reading this because you have one of these
Toshiba's, or just because you have any other machine that you have
something not functioning in the way you wish it would. I hope this site
can be of any help for you.

Here, I will cover what I had done to get everything working the way
I wanted. And that is, to have Debian Sarge with a recent kernel and
with VMware running, so that I can get to Windows sometimes when I just
cannot get away without it. I also made sure, I have a decent media
player, and to get my Locales set up correctly for Hungarian and
Japanese inputs. Later I had wireless set up as well.

A good way to this manual, is to read whatever you need to read. I
wrote down everything, but you might only need a fragment of that.

Note: The reason why I had to install Woody initially, was that
despite to the fact VMware runs on both Woody and Sarge, I could only
attempt a windows XP install when I ran VMware on top of Woody. When
windows was installed, I just left that partition untouched, reinstalled
Debian Sarge, and installed VMware, and just chose to run the Virtual
Machine (VM) from the already existing Windows partition, and it booted
just fine.

Issues: (If you have already figured these out, please let me know,
and I will update the site, "and my laptop".

- X server occasionally freezing when using the "trident"
driver but fully functioning with the "fbdev" driver.
- SIR IrDA not working, only FIR (4Mbit/sec)
- Get IrDA working on the Virtual Machine in VMware

First, lets start
with the basic. I will share my experiences with Debian Woody.

The Distribution installs very smoothly, with a few exceptions to
consider. I have the docking station, so I can only tell how it is to
boot from the CD, as I had this luxury, that I didnt have to bother with
the net install.

I will assume that you have a basic knowledge of Linux, and Debian in
particular, so I wont go into all little details. Boot the CD and do the
usual things to boot from it. For me, it first complained that this CD
doesnt have the necessary Kernel on it, but while hesitating on what to
do, it just passed this stage and went on with the boot with this 1
minute delay. Dont take the CD out, and brake your laptop, just wait, it
will go.

When you get to the part where you can select the modules, dont
forget to select the following

maestro - for the sound

eepro100 - for the NIC on the docking station.
Please note that it is an INTEL driver we install and not a
3COM, despite that the NIC is a 3COM NIC. It just wont work with
the 3COM driver, but will with the eepro100

IrDA support
AGP support
USB support - uhci if I remember correctly

After this, it will
install the base system, and will reboot and give you the Tasksel to
select the packages. I installed the X desktop environment, and Japanese
Environment. You may select what suits your need.

Toward the end, it will ask you a lot of questions about the install.
For the IrDA, select "Native" support, and chose the toshoboe driver.

At one point, the install will ask you if you want to enable the "framebuffer"
feature. Dont forget to say yes to that.

For X, just go with the default, and you will replace the
XF86Config-4 file that I made, or write it yourself.

X Configuration

Now you should have a working Debian Woody install. It might try to
boot into the X windows system, but it is very likely that your X will
crash at this point. It X comes up, shut it down. If you cannot shut it
down, press CTRL ALT F1, and there you stop the process with CTRL Z, or
if you cannot, just open another console with CTRL ALT F2, and log in,
and kill all the X processes. Or if you cannot, just leave them running,
and change the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file with this that I found to be
the best successful one to use the "trident" driver. You might also try
to upgrade to a newer X, from
www.xfree86.org and try your luck with that.

If you find that X keeps crashing on you, you might just go with the
Framebuffer driver. That is stable, but very slow. For that, you had to
answer the question during the initial install, that you do want to
enalbe Frame Buffer for the kernel. If you have, then just use the
XF86Config-4 below, and modify a line in the /etc/lilo.config file from
'vga=normal' to 'vga=791' . This is very important, and also you need to
run /sbin/lilo for the changes to take effect, and reboot.

At this point, I installed my VMware Workstation 4.5, as that is the
current release at time of writing this manual. VMware doesnt support
Debian, therefore one has to obtain the tar-ball version (tar.gz), and
compile it onto the distribution. This will go smootly with Woody and
when its done, just install your operating system inside of VMware, but
I wont go into that much further, as that is very well documented on
their site. The main thing I would like to point out, is that try to
install it onto a physical partition, as opposed to a virtual partition,
that way when you upgrade your Debian, nothing will be lost.

Now, if you are satisfied, just stop reading here. If not, and you
want to get more from your Debian distribution, go ahead and upgrade to
Sarge. There are two way. One, which is to do a over the net upgrade, or
pop in a Sarge CD, that can be downloaded from
here, and
go from there. I have done both, and I liked both the same way. But I
always prefer to do the "clean" install. Yes, on servers, we dont want a
lot of downtime, but this is a laptop for Christ's sake!!

To do an "over the net" upgrade, you need to replace the lines in the
/etc/apt/sources.list file, with the fillowing:

This will download approximately 400~500MB of data, that might take a
while.

When you are finished with the distribution upgrade, you can
reinstall VMware. Just do the same way as you did with Woody, except
when you have it installed, set it up so that it looks for the VM on the
partition it resides on. For me, there was a problem with VMware.
Whenever you install a windows distribution, it will overwrite your MBR
(master boot record), therefore you cannot boot into linux. To fix this,
when you are done with the windows VM isntall, boot from the Debian CD,
and do a rescue. When it comes up, just run:

/sbin/lilo

and it will take care of the Boot loader. From here on, when you
start your VM, it will show the Lilo boot screen, and there you must be
able to select the installed Windows. For that, you need to change
things in the /etc/lilo.conf file. Well, if you have Sarge now, and you
installed it from the Sarge CD, you have grub, and not lilo at this
point. I wont be able to assist with that, as I have no experience with
grub.

Put this in your lilo.conf

other=/dev/hda3
label=WinXP

Obviously, the /dev/hda3 has to match your system. If you dont know
what partition your windows install is on, just go into fdisk, and look
for it.

Now run lilo again, as I mentioned it two steps earlier. (/sbin/lilo),
so that the changes will take effect. Now, when you start your VMware,
and start the Virtual Machine, you will be prompted with your boot
loader, and just choose WinXP, or in your case whatever you put in the
"label=" portion of the lilo configuration.

Get Wireless Working

I spent days, and every weeks researching that what card
I should be getting for my Debian Sarge to work properly. As it turned
out, most of the cards are unsupported by Linux in general. At least the
new cards. When I went to the store, all the cards represented the "new"
technology, hence they wont work with Linux.
Then, I found this site, that lays out very well, what cards are
supported and what cards aren't.
Click
here to see the site.

I then decided to get a Netgear card, as I have always
been attached to Netgear, and their MA401 card was listed as a working
card. It uses the Prism2 chipset. I found it in Fry's, in a back shelf
in a cardboard box, having a large print on it "refurbished" . I coudlnt
have been happier. I grabbed it and payed for it quickly.

I took it home, and popped it in the laptop, that was
already running Debian Sarge. No need to say further, the card was
recognized automatically, and all the modules loaded. The card found the
signal right away, and connected to my Access Point with no trouble. But
I wanted more. I wanted to have features like monitoring, and securing
the link. Therefore I had to install the linux-wlan-ng driver for it.
That was a very tricky one. If you have a matchign kernel to what Debian
offers the driver for, you are in luck. Type in two commands:

uname -a

apt-cache search linux-wlan

The first command will give you what kernel version you have. It will
likely to be something like 2.4.x or 2.6.x. At the time of writing this
manual, debian had only linux-wlan driver for 2.4.x kernels. The second
command will list you all the things debian has for linux-wlan. You will
see the modules, for the specific kernels. If your kernel is included,
you are in luck. If your kernel isn't listed, you have to compile it
yourself. First, download the lates tarball (tar.gz) package from
www.linux-wlan.org

You compile it, having read the README files that came with the
package. This should place the drivers to the right place. After this
point you need to get the linux-wlan-ng package from Debian.

apt-get install linux-wlan-ng

Now, when you set up everything correctly, you should be able to
restart your system, and have wireless working. Just a note, for
wireless in Debian, you need to edit the well known config file only,
the /etc/network/interfaces file. Here is how mine looks: